


The Thirty Years of Shadows

by Tiferet



Series: Dimension 52 AU [2]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Demonic Possession, Dimension Travel, F/M, Fiddauthor (past), M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-04
Updated: 2015-11-04
Packaged: 2018-04-29 16:27:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5134637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tiferet/pseuds/Tiferet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thirty years is too long a time not to come up with some kind of a life, even if it's not the one you planned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Thirty Years of Shadows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ford and Valiska have been known to tell some very entertaining stories when asked how they met each other.
> 
> None of those stories are true. There was only one demon, and there weren't any pirates.
> 
> This is what actually happened.

The first thing I learned about Dimension 52 was that the school I would be attending was full of dim-witted kids half my age who resented my very presence there. Not really surprising.

A doctorate or two from a planet in a dimension that nobody’s ever heard of means nothing, no matter how much work you’ve done. I understood that, but it would have been nice at least to be able to do my second round of undergraduate work at a better school than the first. The more arcane a place is, the less reliable reproducible results become, and more the basic laws of mundane science differ, and there were things I needed to learn—but if I’d only been allowed to study for a month or two and get caught up, I could have tested out of most of my courses.

Unfortunately, I like sleeping under a roof, in a place that I can put wards around without scaring the neighbors. And I have to know what’s in my food so I don’t poison myself by assuming delicious things that everyone else is eating won’t kill me. All of these things require money, and I was never a really good thief. I’d gotten better out of necessity, after I stopped comparing myself to my brother. But working was less stressful and also kept me from spending the time that I didn’t spend on my studies ruminating on my many past betrayals and mistakes.

I had saved some money to get rid of the physical marks Bill left on me, in the hope that this might make it easier to keep him out of my mind, and especially out of my body. The second thing I learned about Dimension 52 was that the only person competent to do that kind of work who wouldn’t charge chirurgeon’s fees or report me to the authorities was Little Vali, who lived above a brothel in the Underdown.

Once the proprietor got it through his head that I really wanted to see Little Vali, not a prostitute, and once he was satisfied that I was aware Little Vali was not a prostitute, I was taken up the back stairs and told to wait for her to let me in. There was a little light, so I got out my class notes and began to go over them. When she opened the door and I stood back up, we were both shocked.

At first I thought she was just a kid, fifteen or sixteen at the most, underfed and underdressed, and I wanted to tell her to go home, get some dinner, do her homework and go to bed, but at the same time, I was aware that was probably not an option for her. I was almost over being shocked by things like that, but not yet.

She was shocked because she knew who I was. “Slide Rule Pines, is this a fucking joke? Because you’re paying my fees for the hour if it is. I have to eat too, you know.”

“Oh God. You’re Valiska.” And then I dropped my books on my foot, because I am always a paragon of grace in the presence of women of virtue. At least I knew now that she wasn’t an actual child.

“Yes,” she said, “and if you tell anyone at school I will cut you, see if I don’t. Do you actually like that name, or would you rather I call you Stanford?”

I shrugged. “Your name is lovely, but please don’t call me Valiska. That’ll just get confusing.” It was a stupid joke, but I wanted to calm her down.

“Stanford it is. Are you going to come in?”

“Yes,” I said. Her consultation room was draped in tapestries, with couches and pillows and a tea set. The only other part of the suite I could see was, amusingly enough, a closet with the door ajar; inside the closet was a tiny desk, and all her homework was spread out on it.

“So, what am I taking off you?”

I had practiced the explanation over and over, but I was still dumbfounded. I had never prepared for the possibility that the person who was going to help me deal with this would be someone I’d have to see almost every day.

She chuckled. “Look, I don’t care where they put it, this is my job. Getting rid of _those_ kinds of charms is actually easy.”

“It’s not one of those!” I protested, painfully aware that I was blushing from the top of my head to the soles of my feet.

“Well, all right then—where are the marks?”

Valiska—my classmate, who was probably also about half my age—was reaching for my tie.

“I’ll…do that.”

“I don’t care which of us takes your clothes off as long as you don’t expect me to be able to see right through them.” She tapped me lightly on the chest and sort of pushed me down onto one of the couches. I took off my coat, then my sweater, and then I undid my tie, while she watched me intently. Then I unbuttoned my shirt, and I heard her breath catch in her throat.

“Love charm? Brain booster? Why would you, of all people, need either of those?”

“Because I am really not as smart as you think I am?”

“I see your test scores in the hallway every week, Mister 115 Percent. Try again.”

“True. But I also did this to myself, which is not a point in my favor.” I opened my shirt, and she stared at it. “Also, I’ve done most of the work before. I can’t study to become a magister because I don’t have acceptable transcripts, so I’m repeating classes I took at least fifteen years ago.”

Valiska ran her fingers just above the lines. It was vaguely unpleasant, like a static charge. “Sorry,” she said. When she got to the pupil of the eye within the triangle, I actually felt a shock. The best description of the look on her face would have been ‘alarmingly alarmed’. “Why?” was the only word she managed.

“I thought he was my friend,” I said, and looked down at it.

“The demon,” she said. “You thought that you, and the demon, were _friends_ …? Did you pay someone to do this, did you do it yourself, or did the demon put it directly on you?”

“That last one,” I admitted. “And yes. I thought he was my friend. And I know I should probably not be allowed to cross the street on my own after making that call.”

Valiska’s eyes were still huge. “I don’t think you have what this is going to cost. You’d be going to a better school if you did. But that’s okay, because you shouldn’t be walking around like this—you’re a menace to public safety! and I need to get my grades up if I ever want to get into a decent alchemy program. You are going to be spending a lot of time with me, and very little of it will be fun, and it is _really_ going to hurt. The demon has its hooks in you deeper than even you realize.”

All of this made sense, unfortunately. “I’m in. If you’re asking me to tutor you, I would probably have agreed to do that last week just to get you to smile. Also, I hate seeing you bullied. I know what that’s like.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’m going to have to do some research. I’ve never even seen this one before.” She sat down on the couch beside me, and patted my arm. “Was it worth it?”

“No.” I was trying very hard not to feel sorry for myself, but it was hard not to when she was feeling sorry for me, too.

“Did you get what you wanted?” Her voice was gentler this time.

“No.” I said.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I can’t imagine how desperate you must have been.”

“I got what I asked for,” I said.

“That is always what happens.” She sighed. “I really am sorry you were ever in a place where this seemed like a good idea.”

I leaned back into the cushions and closed my eyes for a moment. I didn’t want to see her face when she realized how awful a person I really am. “And I wasn’t really desperate. He was more desperate than I was. I just…wanted things.”

“Everyone wants things. It’s all right to want things, Stanford.” Her voice was still so compassionate. “Does your contract have an expiration date?”

“Technically,” I said. “If ‘until the end of time’ is a date.”

That got a long, low whistle out of her. “Tell me, what do you think I can do for you?”

I winced and opened my eyes again. She was still looking at me like I was a person, though. “Not much?”

“There’s a lot I can do, and even more that can be done with help from people I know. Save your money for them. You will need every bit of it,” she said. “But realistic expectations are important. If you want me to tell you that you can go on to Panarcanium after we’re done here and major in goetic arts while still retaining any vestige of your own personality, I can’t do that.”

The very thought of that made me queasy. “That was never on my bucket list.”

“Good. That is normally the kind of thing that someone who would do this voluntarily would want. But you are not the kind of person who would normally do this voluntarily.” She shook her head. “I wouldn’t help you if you were. I’d probably just kill you.”

“I wouldn’t blame you if you did just that.” I sighed. “I wouldn’t even be missed. It would be preferable to repeating some of my other mistakes. I’m just not brave enough to do it myself.”

“Don’t do that,” she said. “Don’t ever. You won’t believe me, but I would miss you.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll make sure you get out of that school with honors first.” I shrugged. “I might as well do something good with what’s left of my life.”

“I want to finish school, but I also really don’t want you to die,” she said softly. “Tell me as much of the deal as you can remember. If there was a written contract, I’d like to see it.”

“He is allowed to enter my mind—and apparently also my body—whenever he likes, in order to create a portal between my home world and a realm of pure magical energy.” I was appalled by how stupid it sounded coming out of my mouth like that.

She frowned. “Stanford, I like you. Kind of a lot, to be honest. Even before this. It’s why I was so upset to see you here, because I thought you were better than someone who’d waste my time to pull a prank or out me to our classmates, and you are. So please don’t take this the wrong way, okay? For such a smart guy, you’re really kind of stupid. And I know you already know that, so I’m never going to say it again. But I had to get it out at least once.”

She liked me? I’d never had an actual conversation with her before. I might’ve asked to borrow a pen from her once when mine died dramatically all over the front of my shirt. Or maybe she was the girl I’d caught when she tripped on the stairs…no, she was the girl whose homework I’d found and left notes on, wasn’t she? She was. She was also the girl whose experiment I’d accidentally blown up one afternoon because the hulking mass of stupid I had as a lab partner was horsing around and knocked me into her bench. I’d felt so horrible, and she’d just shrugged, because people were always messing around with her stuff and I was the only one who’d ever apologized. I couldn’t figure out which one of those girls she was, because she was every damn one of those girls.

“That’s fair,” I told her. “You can say it again, if you need to. Even I can’t remember why I thought that was a good idea. How sad is it that I cannot remember why I completely fucked myself and everyone I care about?”

“He might not want you to remember. I’m going to do something that’ll make you feel better,” she said, and stood up, turning her back to me. I wondered what she was doing, and then the layered robes of glittery, sheer material she had on fell down past her shoulders over her beautifully inked back and spine.

And because I am such a suave guy, I covered my eyes with one hand, flailing with the other in a completely uncoordinated and not at all sophisticated manner. “That’s really not necessary—please put your clothes back on, Valiska!”

“I am not making a pass at you.” I could hear the eye roll in every word, which was understandable, because I am sure I looked exactly as stupid as I felt. But I would also have sworn that she wanted to end that sentence with “yet”, and I’m not normally the kind of person who believes that people actually want to have sex with me. “I want you to look at my back.”

She had had three marks removed. She couldn’t have done either the marking or the removal herself because of the placement. I had learned enough about the human energy body to know that anything placed near the end of the spine can be deadly. Someone had wanted her dead very badly.

The rest of her ink was alive: I recognized sigils of protection, which made sense for the job she was doing. It was beautiful, too. I flexed my fingers instinctively, trying not to make fists. “Does the walking corpse who did that to you have a name?”

Valiska put her robe back on. “She was my mother and she’s probably not a walking corpse, since I am very much alive. I haven’t seen her since I was ten.”

“You are a good person, Valiska,” I told her—just in case she didn’t know. “But I am a _terrible_ person. You never asked for this. I did.”

“You are not a terrible person,” Valiska said. “Listen up, Stanford Pines. Demons have one job: tricking people. As a result, they get very good at it. Don’t feel bad because a predator came after you, even if you thought you asked it to, because predators always try to convince you that you really want them to eat you. I will help you as much as I can, and when I can’t do anything else for you, I will make sure that someone else does. Someone who won’t ruin your life by reporting you.” She poured tea for us both. Had I not even noticed her making it? “You still haven’t told me what you hope to get out of this. We both know you will never be completely free of it. What is the thing you want to be free of the most?”

“I would like to feel like less of an immediate danger to anyone who is even the least bit kind to me. I would like to feel as though I weren’t bringing a deadly infection to every new place I visit. He possesses me when he feels like it. Sometimes I think he’s just bored. And he likes hurting my friends. He really likes hurting my lovers.”

“We’re going to have to be creative.” Valiska warned. “You’re going to have a lot of scars, and a lot more ink than I do, by the time I’m done. I’m probably going to have to shave your pretty hair off before we do anything else. If you have a mark on your crown chakra, I can’t do a damn thing for you until we pay a chirurgeon to get it off.”

“I don’t care about my hair,” I said. “Why would there be a mark on top of my head?”

“Because that’s where possessing entities enter the mind and the body, and the right kind of seal would permit him direct, instantaneous access. You could literally blink right out in the middle of a sentence.”

“I’ve done that.”

“Then we’re going to have to have it removed,” Valiska said flatly. “It’s not a thing you can wait too long to do. The more he uses you the more extensive the scarring will be. The mark will appear on your scalp but is actually inscribed on your cranium. Someone who actually knows what they’re doing will have to cut all of the marked bone away and replace it with metal, preferably an adamantium alloy.”

That was when the panic set in. “You’re going to have someone cut out a piece of my skull? But my brain is in there! I use that to think with! It’s pretty much all I’ve got left!”

“What do you think will become of your brain when the entirety of your cranium is covered in cadmium yellow triangles?” Her voice was still gentle, but understandably impatient.

“I am so completely fucked.”

“You already knew that.”

“I did.” I leaned over and covered my face with my hands. “But I am so completely fucked.”

I felt her hands move through the air above my neck and shoulders. I knew she was not even touching me but I would’ve sworn I felt her fingertips half an inch below my skin. It hurt, but in a good way.

“Stanford, there’s more than one way to build bridges. If you don’t build the artifice, and I suggest you don’t—”

“Oh, but I did,” I told her. “I’ve already built the thing. It left a man I loved worse than dead. I tried to destroy it, to destroy all my notes, but I couldn’t. It felt like I was killing myself. My brother tried to destroy my notes, and I knew deep down that he had the right of it, but I wouldn’t let him. I think I would have killed him first. And then I fell into the damned thing. It might still be running; it might have blown up. It might have to be nuked from low orbit. I hope Stanley managed to destroy it, even though I begged him to bring me back, because I couldn’t let go of it. That’s how I managed to get off my planet and outside my dimension, because after I’d spent enough time in the Outer Darkness to get really bored with it, I started walking. That is literally why I am right here with you, right now.”

There are moments when you realize that you are literally playing the part of the wild-eyed guy in the lab coat who never brushes his hair—the one from the Saturday midnight movies—and you want to tell the girl you’re talking to how stupid that makes you feel—and then you realize that the girl you’re talking to would not know what the hell you were talking about if you did tell her. Because you are really, truly alone in a world that you were never meant to be part of, and she has never seen a Saturday midnight movie in her life, which you need to stop forgetting can’t be more than half the length of yours.

“You’re having a panic attack. Drink your tea.” She refilled my cup.

“Panic is a rational response to this situation!”

“No,” said Valiska. “Panicking is a good way for you to get overshadowed right now. Drink your tea. It will help. And there’s something I need to tell you, that you’re not going to like.”

“That I’m not going to like more than the rest of all this?” I drained the teacup and poured my own this time. After everything this girl had been through and everything that she was offering to do for me, I’d be damned before I would let her serve me. She did not have to serve me, she was doing enough. “Do go on.”

“Stanford, you and I are marked sacrifices. If he really wants to make that portal happen, he can make it out of _you_. Bridges and buildings used to be anchored with human sacrifices. It’s much the same principle.” She sighed. “I gave up my future children in order to pay my sacrificial debt, but mine was time-limited. Yours is not, which means that there would have to be an infinite number of future lives to give up, or you’d have to sacrifice somebody else, and I know you won’t do it. The end of time is the end of time. You can’t renormalize that kind of infinity.”

“I think I’d like something stronger than tea, if you have it.” I had a splitting headache, beginning at the very top of my head, where the bones fused, and tearing down my forehead and my neck.

“I’m going to touch you,” Valiska said softly, almost inaudibly. “Don’t flinch. Just let me look.” I felt her fingers slide through my hair. “There it is,” she said. It felt like she was poking her fingers right into my head. And there was something burning in there.

“Don’t,” I said, and then: “Oh, God, what have I done?”

She let it be and began to ruffle my hair. Some of the pain went away.

“I deserve this,” I said. “For Fiddles’ sake, and all the things I said to Stanley because I was only half there. And for just being stupid. And for taking that money. No oversight, no publication requirements, no nothing. It might as well have come on Miskatonic University letterhead!”

“I’ve never heard of Miskatonic University, Stanford.”

“I used to read _Weird Tales_ when I was a kid…it was a university for space monster cultists. I can’t explain any better than that.” I was always relieved that no one had ever heard of the place when I mentioned it.

“That sounds perfectly charming,” said Valiska. “I realize how ridiculous it is to ask this of you right now, but please try not to be afraid.”

“I see no reason whatsoever not to be afraid. I will do my best not to act like a blithering coward, but I can’t help feeling afraid. Even when I know I deserve it.” The headache was back in full force.

“You have the sweetest brown eyes,” Valiska said quietly. “And there is just a hint of yellow fire in them that is going to take over completely if you don’t stop panicking.”

I started reciting as many digits of pi as I could remember, out loud. I can recite the digits of pi for quite some time, and I went on with that until I felt sure that I had walled Bill out by force of will. When I felt more secure in the knowledge that I was completely myself, I turned to Valiska; I expected her to be angry, but she just looked sad. “Were you flirting with me? Because that was a hell of a time for it! Please don’t flirt with me just to make me feel better.”

“I wouldn’t flirt with you just to make you feel better,” Valiska said, “and I shouldn’t at all, because there is such an imbalance of power between us, right now. But I feel compelled to point out that if I had been flirting with you to stop your panic attack, it would have worked.”

“I’m embarrassed, you know,” I told her. “Not remembering all of the times I’ve spoken to you. When I can remember every time I’ve heard someone say something to you that I wanted to punch them for.”

“Don’t do that,” she said, though she was absolutely beaming at the thought of it.

“I don’t punch eighteen year olds except in self-defense.”

Valiska winced. “I wonder how many people don’t realize how much of everything you see around you, all the time. Nothing would ever get past you if you paid attention.”

“Most of the time, I’m trying to filter things out. It’s weird, being in school with kids. I have a doctorate—more than one—but it’s from someplace no-one’s ever heard of. I’m thirty-six. I think. Time and I don’t really have the same relationship we used to have. But when I’m sitting in the classroom, or in here with you? I feel like I’m eighteen. And I am much too young to die. I really don’t want to die. And I know that I have to do this thing, but it’s scary and I can’t afford to get behind, I need to get to a place where I can do my own research again—”

“Stanford?”

I glanced at her. “Yeah?”

“Stop rushing through everything. The end is coming soon enough for all of us, and sooner than it should, for you. The best way to fight this thing is to do as much as you can to make yourself happy. To strengthen your sense of who you are, and who you are is not the same as what you do. Who are you trying to impress by getting through everything early? What are you going to gain if you work yourself into a place where you lose yourself, and he wins without even trying? Who are you trying to impress? Not me. You barely knew who I was before today.”

She looked really pretty right then, in the candlelight. She always looked pretty, but I hadn’t been paying attention. She had beautiful eyes. Her eyebrows were gently slanted, and her ears sat high on her head like a cat's, the backs of them covered in soft fine fur; you could read her emotions in the way they moved, if you looked. When her hair was free it fell in loose dark curls past her shoulders and most of the way down her back. I wanted to draw her, just as she was. She wasn’t very alien at all. She was more human than a lot of people I’d known back on Earth. I knew she had purple blood and that she liked to eat a kind of pickle that had almost killed me once, but she was a lovely person on every level.

“I don’t know who I’m trying to impress, but I wouldn’t rule you out if I were you.”

She laughed. “I don’t think so. But if you need to feel you’ve impressed me? Don’t worry. You did that before you ever even knew my name.”

“Don’t say things like that,” I told her. “I want to hear them too badly.”

“You want to hear them but you ask me not to say them. Very strange.” She smiled. “So tell me who it is that you’re trying to impress.”

“Everyone,” I admitted. “It’s what I do.”

“It is what you do,” she said. “So you don’t have to try.”

I shrugged. “It just seems like every time I get to where I think I belong the bottom falls out from under me. We had nothing when I was a kid, but my brother and I did everything together, and he had this big pipe dream about sailing around the world, the kind of thing kids do.” I didn’t know how much more I wanted to say about that. “You’re not my psychiatrist.”

“I don’t know what a psychiatrist is,” said Valiska. “But I would like to think that we are going to be friends, so we can tell each other what needs to be told.”

“It’s dangerous to be friends with me. We are allies. We have common goals, including but not limited to getting you out of the middle third of the class and keeping me alive and human. Can’t we talk about you?”

“Not a chance,” she replied with a grin. “I want to know what you were going to say. Go on.”

“Stanley had this dream about sailing around the world, hunting treasure, getting rich, sleeping with different girls every night. I go crazy if I don’t have problems to solve. I love research. I want to know everything, really. The one good thing about what’s happened to me is traveling so many places and learning so much that I’d never have known existed. I realized that not only was it completely impractical, it would make me miserable. But I couldn’t tell him. He wouldn’t hear it. I asked him if he didn’t think we ought to go to college and he said we didn’t need to, and that we couldn’t afford it anyway. He would pretend not to notice me applying for scholarships. I would try and talk to him about doing that sort of thing and he’d laugh it off. I have no idea whatsoever why he thought I would want to sleep with strange women all the time. I would generally like it if girls weren’t afraid of me and wanted to talk to me—”

“And yet you have always been nervous when I tried to talk to you.”

“You were trying to talk to me?” She laughed, and so did I. “I don’t know why you think I’m observant. I’m fucking oblivious.”

“They go together. Filtering. It’s just you seem to be filtering out a lot of the things that you say you want.”

She had me there.

“Well, here is the thing: I actually do not care about sex all that much. I never think about it until I’m with someone I’ve come to know really well, and everything I know about them seems to come together at once, and I see how amazing and perfect they are, and I want to explore them like an undiscovered country. I am _that_ idiot. Nobody thinks I’m interested until we’re all tangled up in each other and covered in sweat. It doesn’t matter if they’re men or women, everyone I’ve ever felt that way about has been completely different from all of the others. But if some stranger makes a pass at me I want to run and hide.”

“It’s all right,” said Valiska.

“Stanley could never see that. He could never see _me_ ; there was only us. I don’t think he even knew I had been with another boy, because it wasn’t a thing he would have ever considered doing. And I loved us, Valiska. But I’m not the smarter, clumsier, gawkier and more virginal version of Stanley, and he never noticed that. He never noticed that I love to work. He never noticed that I can’t _be_ aimless, that if I’m not occupied, reading or writing or drawing or talking, I get bored, and bored me is dangerous me. I was starting to realize that even if it was at all attainable, spending my entire life on a boat with Stanley would eventually mean that one of us would sleep with the fishes. I didn’t know how to tell him. Then I had this one chance at a really good scholarship, at a really good school—an Earth-style version of Panarcanium, maybe. And he completely fucked it up for me. I had made this thing that you’re not even supposed to be able to make—it’s still considered impossible, thanks to my brother—and I thought it was the loveliest thing that I had ever done. And _he broke it_! And I shouldn’t swear in front of you, because you are a lady.”

I also probably shouldn’t have been throwing my hands in the air like I was, like I did when it happened.

“I happen to find the way you swear charming. And I swear in front of you rather a lot, as well.” Valiska grinned at me.

“Part of what makes you a lady,” I said, “is that you always know when to swear. In my case, if F-bombs were H-bombs, no planet I ever set foot on would remain in one piece. Anyhow, after he does this, and he swears it wasn’t intentional, but if it wasn’t, why didn’t he tell me so I could go fix it—he _still_ thinks that we are sailing off into the sunset together because he still hasn’t noticed that I am an awkward, hyperactive nerd with a permanently sunburnt nose and also because it doesn’t occur to him that I might feel _a little_ betrayed. But my parents walk in on our fight and I don’t even get to finish having it!”

“Did Stanley ever apologize for this shitshow?” I was starting to think she was swearing on purpose to get me to keep on doing it.

“My parents threw him out of the house, and he didn’t come back. They couldn’t let me handle it, or him, myself. It was all about them. They were telling him that because he had ruined my chances, he had cost _them_ money. Because everything I have is theirs, and for them. Everything. I am their trophy. I am the one they tell all of their friends about. I am the one who is going to fix everything. I am the one who is going to take care of them all. For all their allegedly righteous anger, they did not care one little bit about this _beautiful thing that I made_ that he broke or even how badly I wanted to go to that school, because whether or not I actually wanted to go made no more difference to them than it did to Stanley!”

“Isn’t it nice that you are now on a completely different planet in a totally different dimension from all of these people?” Valiska said in a tone that was almost ominously cheerful. “I am so glad I don’t know them, and I’ve never even met them. I cannot imagine what a relief it would be to be out of their reach if I actually _knew them_.”

“That’s because you are not as pathetic as me. I actually miss him. I miss him a lot. I just wanted my own damn life.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sure I’d be more sympathetic if I knew him as well as you do. But I don’t. And I’m not. But you’re free of those people. You don’t have to do anything that you don’t want to do! If you want to graduate, you have to do your homework; if you want to continue being an independent sapient being, you have to get some of this damage he’s done to your energy body reversed; you also have to eat and sleep…but you don’t have to please anyone else! You have a chance to be your own person…at least for a while.”

At least for a while. That was the thing. That was the thing right there.

“That sounds nice. But unfortunately, Valiska, I have gone and broken a lot of things that I need to rebuild.”

“Can you actually do that?”

I was thoroughly confused.

“Tell me what you broke that you think you can fix.”

“I damaged the fabric of reality in a place where it was already fraying by building the portal,” I told her. “I don’t know why, but that particular place is important to him. And I half let him through.”

“You can’t fix that,” she said.

“I have to try.”

“No, you _don’t_ ,” she countered. “You promised this thing—I refuse to call it a he—that it could use your mind and body to make its way through. You should never, ever, ever go back there. If you go back, you won’t be building the portal. You will fucking _become_ the portal.”

“Okay. But I broke up my best friend’s marriage. I asked him to come there and work for me and I knew that he was still into me even though we broke up before graduation, because I love the way this man thinks and there’s nothing about him that isn’t delicious to me, but we had to stop because people were noticing us and it wasn’t a good place or time to be what we were to each other, which you won’t understand because you’ve never lived where I lived. And I knew that if we were working together I wouldn’t be able to keep my hands off him, but I told myself that I could. And then Bill started fucking around with us both. Literally. I would find myself apologizing for things I hadn’t done and could not remember doing, and I would be utterly heartsick because I would never have done them. And then at some point I decided he had to be lying, trying to keep us apart. And you’re going to think I meant Bill in that sentence, but no, I did not, because I was stupid in love with both of them, but Bill—”

“Stop saying its name. I understand what you are saying. But you have to stop thinking of it as a person! It isn’t a person, Stanford. _It was not a person and it never loved you_.”

I thought at this point that she was about to tell me to get lost, now that she knew how awful a person I really was. But she didn’t. She wiped her eyes with a napkin, which smeared her makeup a little. “Go on. Just don’t…don’t fucking _invoke_ it.”

“Valiska, I hurt him. Not it, I hurt _him_. It would have been kinder if I had shot him in the head. He got sucked into the portal himself, very briefly, but he came back all wrong. It was an accident. By which I mean it shouldn’t have happened, and I didn’t try to make it happen, and I tried to stop it, but I have since realized that it was in no way accidental.”

“Of course it wasn’t.” She didn’t even seem surprised.

“Even after that he still tried to stop me, but I wouldn’t listen, so he basically wiped his own mind. He utterly destroyed himself.”

Why the hell was I telling her this?

“No. He did not destroy himself, and you did not destroy him. _Your demon lover did_.” She was furious, and it showed in the set of her shoulders, the flint in her eyes, the way that her fingers were clenched in her lap.

“I let it happen.”

“You were hardly given a choice!” she snapped. “Have you listened to nothing I’ve told you? That is what demons are. That is what they do. That is how they work.”

“I need to fix it,” I said.

“You _can’t_.” She opened a box of sweets, laid it out on the couch, and ate one. “Can you bring back his memories? You can’t. And since he doesn’t want them, it would only be another violation. Can you make his wife come back to him? I would think you’re the last person in the entirety of dimensions she ever wants to see. You can’t fix any of this. The only possible way you can make amends is to leave it alone and give matters a chance to improve. And take care of yourself, strengthen your mind, hallow your soul, do what you love and make good things. That is how you make sure that you do not allow this thing to have its way with anyone else you love.”

I was exhausted. I stretched out on the couch. She looked down at me, sadly, and began to flick her fingers through my hair again.

“Maybe you should stop doing that?”

“I really shouldn’t touch you without asking first,” said Valiska. “You or anyone else for that matter. But maybe especially you. You did not deserve all this. Do you want me to stop?”

“No, not really.”

She took one of the sweets and put it into my mouth, and while I probably should have asked what it was, I ate it. I miss chocolate, but it was nice. “Demons love low blood sugar,” she said. “At any point in time, did you tell this demon that you wanted it to sleep with your boyfriend without asking permission from either of you, or that you wanted it to break your planet? I can’t say that I know you well, but none of those things seem like things you would say.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

“Well, all right then. You’re not such a terrible person.” She smiled.

That was when I realized that I was about to put my head in her lap and she was about to let me. “Valiska, what are we doing? I really can’t imagine you are like this with everyone who comes for your help.”

“Well, I wouldn’t make any money that way,” she said. “You’re right. I should maintain professional boundaries with you. I have just heard your entire confession. And I’m not a priest or a priestess of anything. But I will go to my grave without speaking a word of it. I could hurt you very, very badly if I chose to; I know exactly where you hurt. But all I want to do is make it stop hurting.”

“You’ve never heard a story like this one?” It bothered me how much it appealed to me that she hadn’t.

“I haven’t,” she acknowledged. “You have no idea how furious I am. But not at you. I think you must have come from a place where demons have far less power and fewer advantages than they have in most of the places people live.”

I shrugged. “When all of this began, I would not have believed you if you had told me that he—it—was a demon, even though I ought to have known that you don’t light candles in a circle around you and meditate to summon aliens. I think I thought people were calling them demons, when they were really a sort of alien, a perfectly normal thing to be where they lived.”

“I have heard of places like that.” She yawned a little, and suddenly looked very small, very tired. “You have a lot of arcane ability for someone from a place like that. Probably why you were chosen.”

“I should leave, shouldn’t I? You have other visitors, homework to do—” What had she done with my tie, anyway?

“I think you should eat at least half of my pizza. And then you can have a look at my terrible essay.”

Some of her essays really were terrible. “Do you actually have a pizza? Do you even know what a pizza is?”

“I will have it when it gets here,” she said. “It’s late. You have no idea how long you have been here, do you? I did not expect anyone to be here this late, but I also did not expect you. It’s a scheduled delivery, and they had better give me the damned thing for free. There is no excuse for this. They deliver here all the time. I am a wretched cook.”

“I’ll pay for it.”

“You will do no such thing, Stanford Pines. This is a matter of principle.”

“You’re not easy to argue with, are you?”

“No,” she said. “Your demon lover will not like me even a little bit.” She smiled at me.

“I don’t want him—it—to like you.” I decided to change the subject. “Why do you want to be an alchemist?” I asked her. “I think you must be very good at what you do, even if I’m an advanced case.”

“Because it is dirty, dangerous work,” she said, “and I fell into it by accident, and I would like to live to be older than thirty. I have been doing this since I was twelve, when I left home; I apprenticed in order to pay for my own work, and of course I had no education then, and it was better than being an actual prostitute. I do enjoy helping people, and I sometimes like my job quite a lot. But it’s not sustainable. And also? You are not the only one here who enjoys research. I adore it.”

“I’m pretty sure you could afford to pay a tutor for less than what getting involved with my problems will cost you,” I told her. I did not like thinking of her, as a twelve year old, hearing stories like mine. Even if none of those stories were quite as bad. I also didn’t like the idea of her, as a twelve year old, removing the Everhard charm that so many men don’t realize actually is a curse.

“I’m pretty sure that if I let you go on destroying yourself it would break my little blue heart. Also, I am on the same planet as you, which means that getting you off this track will be beneficial to my future health and my desire to live past thirty. If I do die young, I don’t want it to be as collateral damage.” She was smiling when she said it, and she still had her hand in my hair, and it still stung.

“You will be an alchemist,” I told her. “I promise. If you are intelligent enough to do what you’re doing right here, you are intelligent enough to get through school and have a career that won’t take years off your life.”

“That sounds like something you may also have said to your brother?” Valiska said wistfully.

“Stanley didn’t want it. You do.”

“Your parents named you Stanford and Stanley?” She giggled.

“They weren’t very creative.” I shrugged. “So why don’t you have a surname?”

“If I use the surname of my family of birth, they’ll kill me,” Valiska said lightly. “I’m a stain on their honor. I refused the sacrifice. I will take lovers whenever I please. I live on my own and answer to no man.”

“I already hate these people,” I told her, and meant it. “Why, in such an advanced society, with all this magic, are people still starving in the streets and sacrificing their kids?”

“I don’t know. But please save yourself before you go saving my world, your own, or anyone else’s?”

I realized then that I almost felt safe with her. As long as I didn’t think too hard. “You should make up a name.”

“I don’t want to.” Valiska rested her head on her arm; her hair fell down into my face. “If I’m going to have a family name, I want it to be from an actual family. Or at least an actual person.”

“Family is overrated,” I told her. “You had a family. They didn’t deserve the name. You don’t need anyone else, Valiska. You are enough. You are more than enough. You are good, you are brave, you are intelligent, you are certainly wiser than I am, and you are worthy of having whatever you want in this world, or any other world that is lucky enough to encompass you. Finding a husband—or a wife—wouldn’t change what your family did to you, or give you back the things you should have had before now. You should name yourself.”

“But I don’t want to, Stanford. This is not up for debate.” She took a lock of her hair and brushed my face with it. “My life, my name.”

I was pushing her limits, and I knew it. Maybe I wanted to know they were there. But I stopped. I was tired of being that jerk. “So. I _really_ have to get a piece of my skull replaced.”

“You really, _really_ do. They won’t hurt you. I could stay with you. When you do it. You’ll be awake, but you won’t feel it.”

“I’m brave enough to go by myself. And I’m taking up more than enough of your time.” I sat up, and began to button my shirt. “You heard everything I said, about what happens, sometimes, when I realize how completely unique and beautiful and good some people are inside and out? You might not really want me to see how amazing you actually are.”

“I was not unaware that you meant it in part as a warning. But you know very little about me, so I must be safe?” She raised one eyebrow, like a Vulcan would.

“Of course you are,” I said, because I’m such a goddamned liar.

“Allies,” she said, and thrust out her hand.

I had had enough of special handshakes to last me a lifetime or ten. I am afraid that I lifted her hand to my lips and kissed it, instead, and she turned her hand over in mine, and gave me a look that was an outright dare to kiss her palm.

“You really want to play with fire? We may have more in common than you think, and none of it will be sense, as in the common kind of sense.”

“Maybe not before dinner,” she said, and I let go of her hand.

“Not before dinner, and not before your essay makes more sense than the last six did, and not before I have had half my skull replaced,” I told her. “If ever.”

“I know,” she said, all business. “I really do. I just wish, right now, that I had been able to get to know you in almost any other way than this. Not because I don’t want to know all this about you. I want to know whatever you want to tell me, but…”

“You want to know the man you think I was before I did this to myself,” I told her, “but you don’t understand that he was a jerk and you wouldn’t have liked him and he would have hurt you the same way he hurt all the other people he loved. Just remember, I knew the bastard.”

“No, Stanford, you didn’t. That’s the tragedy of all this, I think.” She wiped her eyes again, glancing away. “If you had ever known yourself, and liked yourself, you would never, ever, have done these things. And I’m not as good a person as you think I am, because a part of me cries out that I would never even have met you, then.” She got up and went to fetch her books, and I did not touch her again, nor she me, until I kissed her hand again to say good night.

At least I don’t have to be an undergraduate again without pizza.

_I am so completely fucked._

_I have a new best friend, and she is brilliant and brave, and I will never ever do her harm._

_And I am such a goddamned liar._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rewritten--the first version was posted when I hadn't had any sleep for quite some time, and today I fixed it. --tif :)


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